One of the most transparently-insincere and dishonest talking points leveled by The Failure’s acolytes against Ron DeSantis and his campaign is the idea that people who would be open to supporting DeSantis are driven away by the alleged hostility of his online surrogates. As preposterous as it may seem, the likes of JD Vance, Dan Bongino, Michael Knowles, Candace Owens, Tim Pool, Cassandra MacDonald, and the legion of anonymous trolls to whom they pander would have you believe the thing most keeping them in the Trump camp is an aversion to mean tweets.

The shamelessness at work here is worthy of any Democrat, from the fact that “surrogates” usually means anyone online who happens to support DeSantis but isn’t affiliated with his campaign, to the “meanness” usually meaning as little as pointing out the awfulness of Trump and his supporters or speaking bluntly about the foolishness of giving him another shot, to the hypocrisy of whining about tough criticism while shilling for a candidate who tells bald-faced lies about his opponent while he and his campaign promote some of the vilest smear merchants in the business.

The biggest irony to this gaslighting, however, is that if anything the DeSantis campaign has suffered from treating Trump and MAGA too delicately.

He’s not afraid to mention Trump’s mountain of betrayals, screwups, and weaknesses, like listening to Fauci, not draining the swamp, signing the CARES Act, signing the First Step Act, and being unlikely to beat Joe Biden, but it never seems to go much beyond mentioning. The tone is rarely stronger than “Trump didn’t do X, or shouldn’t have done Y,” or “I would be better at Z,” and it’s not the focus of his messaging; Biden and Florida are. Hell, during the first primary debate, he barely even mentioned Trump.

You can tell people ‘till you’re blue in the face to wait for the ground game to deliver a surprise in Iowa that turns everything around, but all the information we have now, including the trendlines in Iowa, indicates that it’s not working.

As incomparably bold a governor as DeSantis has been, this approach smacks of a campaign mentality that is painfully conventional, beholden to the standard GOP mindset that voters want a “positive vision” instead of “divisiveness” and “negativity,” with perhaps an assumption that Trump’s defects would be more obvious to primary voters, or at least more responsibly covered by conservative media—and fear of being too rough on Trump lest they alienate his supporters. His campaign’s most potent attacks are largely relegated to his social media operation, which simply doesn’t reach the people he most needs to reach: the ones who aren’t proactively following the campaigns and their output.

This approach misdiagnoses basically everything important about the electorate and the information environment shaping their thinking. As we’ve been over recently, most GOP primary voters, including those currently picking Trump in polls, are not emotionally attached or intractably devoted to him; they’re open to being convinced of a better option. But they’re not deciding who’s better by actively comparing how DeSantis talks about Biden to how Trump does. Hell, judging by how many Republicans ignorantly assume Trump is the most electable option, they aren’t even aware it’s a question. And they certainly aren’t being informed by mainstream conservative media of the reasons he isn’t, let alone the reasons he’d still be an inferior president even if he was.

Case in point: at one point during an interview this week with Dave Rubin, DeSantis suggests that Trump’s most ridiculous smears, like that Andrew Cuomo handled Covid-19 better than he did, are so transparently ridiculous that they actually help him, not Trump. But a few moments later, DeSantis himself hits on the reason such an effect hasn’t weakened Trump more: because such ravings are so often confined to Truth Social. Team DeSantis needs to understand that the big talk radio names and online outlets in a similar vein aren’t telling their audiences about Trump’s most self-discrediting words or actions.

More fundamentally, they need to understand that Biden’s badness isn’t at issue within a Republican primary, and that ability to summarize that badness isn’t what will make an impression on the people who need to be woken up. The guy standing in the way of the nomination to take on Biden needs to be the focus. Force a serious, grown-up conversation about why he can’t be the nominee—both because of what a disastrous president he was and because he’s nearly certain to lose an election with so much at stake.

Take two of Reagan’s gravest speeches (Time for Choosing and Encroaching Control) as models for leveling with people about the gravity of what’s in store for us if we make the wrong choice. Don’t be afraid to be blunt, to speak the uncomfortable, even if people don’t want to hear it. Because you know what? The people who can’t handle the truth about Trump are never voting for you anyway, and if there really are enough of them to decide the primary, then you aren’t getting nominated either way—and the Right is too far gone for any of this to matter.

This is the most important Republican primary of our lives. It will decide whether conservatives are going to claw back enough sanity and responsibility to make this movement worth a damn to the country’s future, or if the Right is well and truly content to die as a combination circus freakshow, marketing scam, and personality cult. Acolytes for the latter arrangement may be obsessed with projecting their sins onto those standing in their way, but unless Team DeSantis recognizes the need to drag that question into the center of the stage, it shouldn’t be surprised Republican voters ultimately choose to keep entertaining themselves at the price of the country.